Before You Lies Eternity
by ncfan
Summary: There had always been windows into Beatrice's Golden Land, though few would have known where to look to find them. [Spoilers for the entire series]


I own nothing.

* * *

There had always been windows into Beatrice's Golden Land, though few knew would have known where to look, and even fewer would have set down a parlor room table and a tea set, let alone a plate of tea cookies. Erika had overlooked the windows, perhaps out of haste, though finding them wouldn't have done her any good. The windows were and always would be impenetrable, either by human, magical, heavenly or demonic means. Sometimes, Asumu wondered why Beatrice had made her land with windows. Perhaps even the creator wasn't aware that they were there, or perhaps they were fitted with one-way glass—none of those Asumu observed ever seemed to notice her, after all.

There were a few she wished would notice her.

"Would you like some tea, Asumu?"

After all this time, she couldn't help but be shocked by the calm, remarkably pleasant timbre of her mother-in-law's voice as she spoke.

Asumu and Rudolf had only married a few months before Shizuka died; Eva, Hideyoshi and George were the only members of Rudolf's family Asumu had even met before the wedding. By the time Asumu had met Shizuka, her health was in serious decline; it was only another two months before the accident that would leave Shizuka bound to her bed and dying. Asumu had thought it sad, as her mother-in-law wasn't even sixty when she passed away, and had only lived to see the birth of her first grandchild.

But Shizuka's disposition? Her disposition when Asumu knew her was not one that easily engendered sympathy. She was exacting and strident, never pleased with anything or anyone. Asumu remembered, even now, how Natsuhi had run herself ragged trying to please Shizuka, always in vain. Even now, she remembered how a then seventeen-year-old Rosa had given up on pleasing her mother and could only dissolve into miserable tears after receiving her latest dressing-down. (Neither could Asumu forget that neither Krauss, Eva, nor even Rudolf, who seemed fondest of Rosa of the siblings, ever spoke up in her defense.)

Another thing Asumu remembered, both from personal experience and stories told later, was that Shizuka was convinced that her husband had been hiding a mistress somewhere on Rokkenjima. She grimaced uncomfortably as she remembered Eva telling her about how Shizuka would look for Kinzo's other woman, would send servants out to comb the mansion whenever he disappeared. Her uncomfortable grimace turned to a frown as the bitter, derisive smile Eva wore when recalling all of this came to mind. Shizuka had been right in the end, hadn't she? She just hadn't had all of the details, especially about Kinzo's _relationship_ to the woman he was hiding on Rokkenjima.

She stared down at the remarkably peaceable expression on Shizuka's face. _I never really saw her at anything but her worst, did I?_

"Oh… Yes, thank you."

Shizuka handed Asumu her teacup with practiced ease, her eyes downcast. The appearance she had taken on was another thing Asumu was unused to. In all the time Asumu had known her mother-in-law, Shizuka had tended to dress in clothes that looked more appropriate to Victorian England than 1960s Japan. It was Kinzo's conceit, of course; he was obsessed with all things western, and as Shizuka had been married to him during the 20s, she likely would have taken her cue from the sorts of old European clothes she thought he might be more pleased with than the traditional clothes of a Japanese lady from an old, conservative family (Shizuka was probably whom Natsuhi had taken her cues from as well). She also remembered Shizuka as a woman who had aged badly: her hair dishwater gray, her face pale and lined and sagging, her bones brittle, her fingers like claws. Through physical travail and emotional privation, she had ended up like that.

Now, however, she could not have looked any more different. Shizuka had put aside those painful-looking dresses and donned a simple bronze-colored kimono with dark purple brocade in the shapes of spring flowers. She appeared as a young woman, probably around twenty-five or so. Her hair was glistening auburn rather than dull gray, sleek and smooth. Asumu looked at her and found her face youthful, her cheeks full rather than hollow, her hazel eyes bright rather than dull.

She looked like Eva. Asumu had never realized how much Eva resembled her mother physically, for even in the old photographs of Shizuka as a young woman, she more resembled a shadow than a person of her own, a "borrowed womb" of the Ushiromiya family rather than a woman with her own life; she had faded into the background of every photo, even the ones that had no one else in them. The expression she wore was different from Eva, though, and it was possibly the thing about her most different from the woman Asumu had known.

When Asumu knew Shizuka in life, she had somehow managed to seem both feverishly energetic, and weary beyond measure. Now, she was at peace. Well, perhaps not at peace. Asumu had thought she seemed that way, but she realized now that what she was seeing might be more indicative of Shizuka being beyond caring about her husband or her family. The prospect of ending up that way, Asumu didn't know whether it gave her hope or terrified her.

Shizuka spotted Asumu looking at her and smiled slightly. It wasn't the nicest smile Asumu had ever seen. "You see me as I was before I was married to Kinzo." Her tone carried with it bitterness—perhaps not so above it all after all. "I think I have that right."

Asumu winced. "Of course." Her gaze strayed to the window, where she could see a scene of Battler speaking with Rudolf and Kyrie amidst golden roses and flittering gold-leaf butterflies. They all looked so happy. Whether it was genuine of a self-indulgent illusion, they all looked so happy. It was a happiness that did not include her. It had not even been designed to include her.

Once more, Shizuka followed Asumu's gaze. This time, her expression softened. "I'll draw the shades," she murmured, briefly standing to draw down the shades on the window (why on earth _did_ the window have shades? Asumu still wasn't sure about that), before returning to her seat. "I find watching them to be… tiresome. Now please, drink your tea. Making and serving my own tea is a pleasure I have been unable to indulge in a long time."

The tea was wonderful, though for the life of her Asumu couldn't pin down the taste. She had found few foods here that had a proper taste to them, though no one else ever seemed to complain about it. Sometimes, she wondered if it was just her.

"So what brings you here?"

As before, Shizuka led the conversation. Asumu had endured too many conversations with Kinzo to ever think about trying to speak before spoken to with one of her parents-in-law—a lesson she likely needed to unlearn, if Shizuka had chosen to shed her own… wildness. She shrugged her shoulders, reaching up self-consciously to push a stray curl from her face. "I… Well, I heard about what had happened here. I was curious."

Shizuka nodded. Her eyes were shut and she resembled a statue in meditation. Even with the edges of bitterness about her, she still seemed so much more at peace than Asumu had ever known her to be. At last, she opened her eyes to stare down into her teacup. Her gaze was pensive, the emotions behind it tentative, as though she feared the risk of expressing them (_As though she was still at any risk_). In that moment, Asumu thought that she resembled someone else she had seen once, through other windows, and thought that Shizuka would be repulsed to have such a comparison made. "As much as I should not be, so was I."

"_As much as I should not be…" _For her husband and children never really seemed to care that much for her. Natsuhi seemed to hold her in higher esteem than her own flesh and blood, and the less Kinzo was heard to say about Shizuka, the better. Asumu wondered, as she was always left to do when faced with her husband's bewildering family, how much of that had been Shizuka's own fault, with her off-putting behavior. At the same time, she wondered how much of it was due to the Ushiromiya family being so used to hurting each other that speaking ill of their late matriarch and viewing her with scorn was nothing more than second nature. Asumu was glad that she had never been able to witness much of Shizuka's interactions with her children, or her husband.

"I feel as though I've been forgotten," Asumu whispered, staring out into the fathomless void beyond their table, the sea of stars and the roads to different realms.

A trill of laughter escaped Shizuka's lips. "Forgotten, you? Asumu, though your son may not speak of you often—certainly not with Kyrie around, I imagine—I would be far more surprised if memory of you ever left his heart. Tell me, when the witch stole his sense of identity out from under him, what notion of his did she prey upon to do so?"

"_You are not Asumu's son."_

Asumu felt a jolt of pain lance through her forehead, before vanishing.

Another bout of laughter bounced in the air, but this time it was sharper, a bark rather than a trill. "Now, if anyone has been forgotten—" Asumu stared at her mother-in-law and was shocked to see Shizuka's hazel eyes sparkling "—it is me. If I were to sit by this window with the shade pulled away for a hundred years, I would be shocked to hear any one of them mention me once. And _don't_ try to reassure me otherwise, Asumu. You were a member of the Ushiromiya family for far too long to fool yourself into thinking that they could suddenly decide that I was someone worth mourning. That I was someone whose absence was worth missing."

Asumu opened her mouth to tell Shizuka that she was simplifying the matter too much, but thought better of it.

"I have been rather curious about you, though, my dear." Shizuka stirred her tea with a small spoon, running the fingers of her other hand on the edge of the plate filled with tea cookies. "I'm not sure when we will meet again, once we leave this place, and you'll forgive a mother her curiosity about her children." Shizuka looked up, and smiled with extraordinary, excruciating gentleness. "When did you first realize that Battler wasn't your son?"

"He _is_ my child," Asumu retorted, stiffening and glaring at her mother-in-law. "Does twelve years of caring for him and loving him and raising him as my own count for nothing, on account of the simple fact that we do not share the same blood?" she asked coldly. Asumu remembered old books that she had read, where the orphaned hero was determined to find out about their _true_ parents. Half of the time, they'd grown up without any parent figures of their own, but on the occasion when they had had loving grandparents or aunts or uncles or foster parents who had always cared for them and protected them, Asumu felt keenly the disloyalty of the book's hero. Especially after she began to care for Battler.

Shizuka seemed to realize that she had struck a nerve. She grimaced, and a shadow fell over her face, momentarily rendering it as old and weary as it had been when Asumu knew her mother-in-law in life. "Forgive me, Asumu," she said quietly. "There should be no need for that. Not here. I am not in any place where I should need to be so… _incisive_, not without need." She straightened, and there was no mistaking the touch of resolve that made her jaw line look harder than it should. "But I really am curious, Asumu." There came another gentle smile, but it didn't make Asumu's hackles rise like the last one had. "It seems that I underestimated you a great deal. I'd never thought you capable of something like that."

Asumu sighed.

She had never thought that she would have to tell this tale. But there was a question she could ask in return, one that burned at the back of her throat, if she could just tell Shizuka what she wanted to know.

"…I remember in the hospital, just after I gave birth." She wasn't looking at Shizuka, or at the void, or at anything in particular. Her gaze was unfocused. "They were whispering over me, the doctors and the nurses. I was still fading in and out from all of the anesthesia I'd been given, but I wasn't deaf. I remember the word 'stillbirth'. I still remember how cold my blood had went. I…"

Asumu laughed, a thick, choking laugh. "…You know, I was so excited when I found out that I was pregnant. Of course, I was embarrassed as well; Rudolf and I hadn't even been _talking _about getting married when I realized that I was going to have a baby." Shizuka sniffed in disapproval, but Asumu knew that it hadn't been meant for her. "And then I heard the people who had looked after me talking about a 'stillbirth.' But Rudolf… He just laughed it of when I tried to talk to him." Asumu sucked in a deep breath. "…He told me that I must have been hearing things, that I was still feeling the effects of the sedatives and that could have made me remember things wrong. I wanted to believe him, you know." She laughed again. "I love him and I wanted to believe him. And he came into my room with Battler in his arms, and I told myself to believe him.

"Battler was about a year old when I started to have… suspicions again. I thought about how much he looked like Rudolf, and like Kinzo. He even has hair the same ridiculous shade of red as Rudolf's underneath all that hair dye; do you know how hard I laughed when I first saw his real hair color?" Asumu demanded. Shizuka smirked a little as she took a sip of tea. "I thought that Battler looked like Rudolf, and like Kinzo, but nowhere in any of that could I see any resemblance to myself.

"And then there was the first time I saw Battler and Kyrie together, when Rudolf invited her over to our house."

"Ha!" Shizuka's expression seemed caught between a bitter smile and a horrible grimace. "I always knew that Rudolf had inherited his father's unbelievable gall, but I'd not thought he did anything like that."

Asumu couldn't help a bitter smile herself. "Indeed. Rudolf had this incredible notion that Kyrie and I could somehow become _friends_ if we were forced to meet one another often enough. I like to think of myself as a forgiving woman, but I am not blind. Kyrie wished for my death from the first moment she began taking me seriously as a threat, and even if she did not, I do not think that things would ever have been easy enough between us for friendship. Rudolf entertained this notion of his to assuage his guilt over the fact that he was still sleeping with her when he was married to me.

"Battler was four, and he took to Kyrie straight away." Asumu rubbed her forehead tiredly. "I wasn't surprised, not really. Kyrie just had something about her. But I would look at them together, and when Battler made a certain face, something that had been bothering me finally made sense. The features that weren't Rudolf's or Kinzo's, I knew them from somewhere, but I couldn't place it. When I saw Battler and Kyrie together, I realized that those features belonged to her."

Shizuka made a soft noise in the back of her throat. "And yet you never let on to Rudolf or Battler that you knew the truth."

"Of course not. He's my son. I love him."

Her biological son, of course, had been put to rest under the name "Sumadera", and could never be laid down under "Ushiromiya" or Asumu's maiden name. She'd not known to mourn him for four years, and when she'd realized what she had lost, Battler had come on her the next day in the living room and asked hesitantly why she was crying, only for Asumu to realize that she could never confide this in anyone. Not if she wanted to keep the son she knew.

(She had wished to God that Rudolf, just once, would have faced up to his mistakes instead of trying to find the easy way out. For all the love she bore her husband, for a time Asumu had very nearly come to hate him. Asumu was forgiving, but she was not blind.)

"And you?"

Shizuka seemed surprised by this question. She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms around her chest, a discomfited expression hovering around her mouth. "Even now," she said slowly, her voice carefully measured, "I do not think that I could suffer the presence of the Castiglioni woman at this table. Kinzo had sense enough not to set the two of us up in the same household, or to introduce us, but even now, I would not welcome her."

"That's not what I meant," Asumu pointed out, staring piercingly at Shizuka out of jade green eyes.

At that, Shizuka's eyes narrowed. "In that case…" Her voice was more a mumble than a murmur, but still rang out clearly in the silence of the void. "…I can only say that I feel sorry for them."

"Them?"

"Yes. Both of them." Shizuka smiled, a strange, small smile. "Kinzo is truly self-absorbed," she remarked softly. "Even when he seeks penance for raping his own daughter, he has to make it about him. As if _his _pain could ever compare to the pain of the daughter he locked up and abused. To the pain of the daughter who was forced to act as a servant to her own family, alone, and was then forced to contend with the realities of a mutilated body, and—" Shizuka's jaw tightened "—the realities of her parentage."

The silence that fell between them after that was yawning.

Asumu wondered how the shy little girl who had always been so happy to see Battler could have ended up like this. Even after watching her story unfold from the balcony over the stage, it still boggled the mind.

And what now, for her?

The sound of the chair scraping as Shizuka stood startled Asumu, not least because she had no idea what the chair could have been scraping against to make that sound. They had no trouble standing and keeping the chairs and table level, but there was no floor, just vast seas of stars in all directions, and a floating cat box at their shoulders.

"Well—" Shizuka set her teacup down on its saucer. "I think I must be going now. Would it be too much trouble to ask you to clean up for me, Asumu?"

Asumu nodded. "…Where will you go?"

Shizuka smiled again, but it was thankfully close to the peaceable expression Asumu was beginning to grow used to. "As I said, Kinzo is truly self-absorbed. He moans about how he never wished to be married to me, about how that justifies seeking his own death—" her face darkened "—a death that would have left his wife and children destitute, I might add, about how it justifies taking a lover when, had I done the same, I honestly suspect that he would have killed me. And not once did he ever consider the fact that I never wished to be married to him, either.

"I did not love him, and I did not expect to. He never loved me, and I never expected him to. But there were other things that, as a wife, I expected." Shizuka frowned down at her feet. The gesture was almost incongruously girlish. "Things I expected, and ought to have been able to ask for—should not have been afraid to ask for. I loved my children, but what did that even mean in the end?

"I lived my life behind walls. Believe it or not, Asumu, I had dreams once, though my dreams were likely not the same as yours. I had dreams, before they were quashed by the reality of my situation. When I was alive, I never realized how terrible a weight it was to bear, being a member of the Ushiromiya family, even if only by marriage." Shizuka laughed brightly. "Only death could ever give me perspective.

"Well, Asumu? I'm dead. Kinzo has no power over me here. I intend to make the most of that." With that, Shizuka strode away into the mist and the star-filled currents, head held high as Asumu had never seen her do in life, and was soon swallowed up.

Asumu sighed, and took another sip of her tea. She still couldn't decide what the taste was—was she detecting lemon, or cinnamon? Something else entirely. She would leave, soon enough, but she was waiting for someone, you see, someone she had been curious about for a while.

She looked up and smiled when she heard footsteps.

"Oh, Ange-chan! Please, take a seat. I was hoping I could speak to you before you returned home."


End file.
